> For logistical reasons I recently had to order a workstation with DDR3-1600 rather DDR3-1866 memory but couldn't find out how much of a real world impact this

> For logistical reasons I recently had to order a workstation with DDR3-1600 rather DDR3-1866 memory but couldn't find out how much of a real world impact this would have. In my experience, RAM speed is not noticeable in practical daily use. I used to have two 2GB sticks of high performance (for the time) RAM in my system overclocked, but when RAM prices fell to the point where I could get another 2x4GB budget set for <$30 I opted to go with a heterogeneous setup and miss out on overclockability. The transformatively positive impact on perceived speed achieved by going from 4GB to 12GB (because of the fact that I almost never touch swap now) completely overwhelmed the iteratively negative impact on perceived speed from dropping from 1600MHz to 1066MHz and from CL7 to CL11. I really did not perceive any increase in general sluggishness, even though I had somewhat been anticipating one. My takeaway from that experience is that for general purpose workstations, DDR3+ is now fast enough that price per GB should be preferred over advertised/benchmarked performance numbers insofar as it allows you to fit more RAM into your given budget.